Jebbal's News

Well, I've been traveling a lot this past week attending aquatics seminars and speaking at small universities. I visited cities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana over the course of 7 days. Crazy! A couple nights ago I checked into a Marriot in PA and received a pleasant surprise taking the elevator up to my room. It was Tom Fulp! Look at us just riding along here. We're just a couple of busy guys dressed in our Sunday bestes'es. Tom invited me up to his suite for some drinks and ladies, but, unfortunately, I had to decline. It was after midnight and I needed to be up at 6AM to catch a flight. We did, however, find some time to snap this pic before we went our separate ways. It was an evening I will never forget.

The image found below was anonymously leaked by a staff member of the Newgrounds team earlier today. It doesn't seem like much at a glance, but what might this mean for the future of Newgrounds? If credible, this could suggest some drastic changes to come for the site's graphic style and layout, along with a few other things:

- The current "Everything, by everyone" slogan will remain.
- The famous tank logo will remain, for the most part, unchanged (artistic renditions aside).
- Various shades of orange and grey appear to remain the site's dominant colors.
- Newgrounds may be adopting a highly "grungey" theme.

I was lucky enough to catch both Tom and Wade Fulp as they were leaving Newgrounds HQ in Glenside, Pennsylvania. Upon speculation of the leaked image Tom commented, "That looks like a still from the animation we were planning to use on our temporary trans- OUCH! I've never seen that before in my life."

Earlier today, glorious user TomFulp contacted me and offered a spot in the Newgrounds Redesign BETA testing group. Being the NG enthusiast that I am, I was quick to accept!

I gotta say, though... it's definitely not what I had expected. I mean, the interface is sleek and easy to navigate, and there are also a lot of new features (Most of them proving quite useful). But the whole thing bears a startling resemblance to Harvard student Mark Zuckerburg's surfacing social network project The Facebook. I'm not sure how this whole thing is going to play out as far as legal issues and whatnot, but I am still very excited for the official launch!

Here are some screenshots I took of the redesign in its current phase:

As you are probably aware, Tom got drunk last night and uploaded some naked pics of himself. Thankfully, his brother, Wade, happened to be monitoring the Flash Portal at the time. Horrified by the title of a new submission, "Heu guys herse me nd my oenis@ votev5", Wade went straight to work attempting to hack Tom's account so he could delete the movie. Time seemed to drag on, and Wade helplessly watched as images of his brother's genitalia racked up over 72,000 views. He was unsuccessful in jacking into the account, and the views continued to roll in by the thousand. That's when I decided to step in. "If glorious user, WadeFulp, isn't going to do anything about this... then I will," I said to myself, getting up from my chair and making my way over to the super computer. I booted up Flash CS 10 Deluxe Combo Champion Edition and got down to business. If I was going to make a cartoon complex enough to crash the Newgrounds server, I was going to need some coffee. I took a few steps towards the coffee maker, but then quickly turned around and went back to my Flash project when I remembered that I hadn't remembered to remember to grind the beans. There was no time. Hour after agonizing hour passed. My hand was beginning to cramp. I shuddered at the sight of the "Insert Blank Keyframe" option. It wasn't until around 10 minutes later that I completed my masterpiece: An epic, four hour depiction of the history of the etch-a-sketch; animated entirely frame-by-frame, and set to a brilliant score composed by Buddy Holly. I sighed deeply and rubbed my burning eyes. It was time. I navigated my browser straight to the Flash Portal and hovered my cursor above the "Submit" button (Everybody was too distracted by Tom's penis to notice me). Two sore asses and a click later, "The History of the Etch-A-Sketch" appeared. I hit refresh, the site was still up. I waited 10 seconds - Nothing. A minute... still up and running. Was my movie not complex enough? Did it not attract enough outside traffic to cause widespread server crashes? I felt my cheeks burning with remorse and smacked my head down on the keyboard. "I have failed you, Tom," I sobbed. But then I heard it... the sound of a welding gun. Then another. I lifted my head up and the image on the screen came into focus.

[EDIT] Well, the awesomest thing happened. My external came around and I was able to recover a bunch of files that I thought were gone for good! I still can't work on projects like Splinter since they are too complex for my CPU to handle, but I can work on SOMETHING! This is a good day. :)